The Spirit of Youth and the City StreetsAddams, Jane
General
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
Addams, Jane
Child rearing; Urban youth
These irregular manifestations form a link between that world in which
each one struggles to "live respectable," and that nether world in
which are also found cases of devotion and of enduring affection
arising out of the midst of the folly and the shame. The girl there
who through all tribulation supports her recreant "lover," or the girl
who overcomes, her drink and opium habits, who renounces luxuries and
goes back to uninteresting daily toil for the sake of the good opinion
of a man who wishes her to "appear decent," although he never means to
marry her, these are also impressive.
One of our earliest experiences at Hull-House had to do with a lover
of this type and the charming young girl who had become fatally
attached to him. I can see her now running for protection up the broad
steps of the columned piazza then surrounding Hull-House. Her slender
figure was trembling with fright, her tear-covered face swollen and
bloodstained from the blows he had dealt her. "He is apt to abuse me
when he is drunk," was the only explanation, and that given by way of
apology, which could be extracted from her. When we discovered that
there had been no marriage ceremony, that there were no living
children, that she had twice narrowly escaped losing her life, it
seemed a simple matter to insist that the relation should be broken
off. She apathetically remained at Hull-House for a few weeks, but
when her strength had somewhat returned, when her lover began to
recover from his prolonged debauch of whiskey and opium, she insisted
upon going home every day to prepare his meals and to see that the
little tenement was clean and comfortable because "Pierre is always so
sick and weak after one of those long ones." This of course meant that
she was drifting back to him, and when she was at last restrained by
that moral compulsion, by that overwhelming of another's will which is
always so ruthlessly exerted by those who are conscious that virtue is
struggling with vice, her mind gave way and she became utterly
distraught.
A poor little Ophelia, I met her one night wandering in the hall half
dressed in the tawdry pink gown "that Pierre liked best of all" and
groping on the blank wall to find the door which might permit her to
escape to her lover. In a few days it was obvious that hospital
restraint was necessary, but when she finally recovered we were
obliged to admit that there is no civic authority which can control
the acts of a girl of eighteen. From the hospital she followed her
heart directly back to Pierre, who had in the meantime moved out of
the Hull-House neighborhood. We knew later that he had degraded the
poor child still further by obliging her to earn money for his drugs
by that last method resorted to by a degenerate man to whom a woman's
devotion still clings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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